Terrific twosomes are popping up like crazy in children’s books. We’ve got identical twins, fraternal twins, boy twins, girl twins, boy girl twins and even a set of triplets! There are twin chickens, twin crime fighters, and even twins at summer camp. I suppose this trend mirrors the current rise in the birth rate of multiples, but it also seems to be a key ingredient for fun summer reading; check out the great reads below.
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G. M. Ford’s Leo Waterman and Frank Corso mystery series are good stuff. Here he branches out on a stand-alone thriller.
As Nameless Night opens, we meet Paul Hardy, a brain-damaged John Doe who was discovered next to a railroad car and has been living in a Seattle group home for the past seven years. Now surgery for a second brain injury in a car accident has strangely resurrected parts of his memory. Not, unfortunately, knowledge of his own identity, though he remembers a name that was important to him for some reason.
Who is he? Why are government agents pounding on the door as soon as the group home's director googles the name Paul remembers?
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A rock musician who has made his mark in the world of popular culture turns to his more 'academic side' as he completes a doctoral degree in astrophysics. His dissertation focuses on the study of 'interplanetary dust'. Yeah, right, you say. For real, I say. Highly-respected former Queen guitarist Brain May has an amazing life story to go with his new book, Bang! The Complete History of the Universe. Written with fellow scientists Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott, Bang! does indeed provide an enjoyable and accessible look at the 'big bang' - in less than 200 pages. Listen to an interview with Dr. May from npr.org, dated 5.8.08.
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Smalltown Canadian girl meets cosmopolitan Dublin girl in Emma Donoghue's long-distance love story Landing.
Jude is flying to London to bring her dying mother home. Sile is the airline hostess on the flight. Despite the circumstances and the complicated relationships they both are already involved in, they're attracted to each other.
It’s impossible, of course. Jude has hardly ever been out of spitting distance of her tiny town, where she is a museum curator. Sile is in a settled relationship, is part of Dublin’s vibrant twenty-first-century urban scene, and knows from her own Anglo-Indian heritage how complicated long-distance, cross-cultural romance can be.
But they make tentative contact again a few weeks later. A romance of emails, phone calls, and all-too-infrequent visits ensues. Something will have to give, though, as both of them know, if they’re to have a real relationship. Continue Reading…
Maybe it’s something about radio. I really loved Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices, a marvelous little novel about the BBC during World War II. Now here’s a Canadian novel about a radio station crew, Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, and I’m charmed and impressed by it, too.
It’s 1975 in the little town of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Here we meet Harry Boyd, an old-time radio man who is acting as temporary station manager. Harry was once a promising young broadcaster till he had a shameful failure in TV and got this second chance in this backwater radio station. He and Eleanor Dew, the cool, competent receptionist, hold the station together as they wait for corporate decisions on its fate. Two new staff members join them, rookie Gwen Symon and Dido Paris, a glamorous new announcer.
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A young newspaper reporter who lives in New York City is given an old diary that was found in a dumpster. The young reporter is intrigued and tracks down the diarist, who is now in her nineties. Together they embark on a life-changing journey. Sounds like fiction, but it's a true story, as described in this marvelous new book. The Red Leather Diary is a real treasure.
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